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A Short History of the Next Campaign

Campaigning is a brutal business, with winners, losers—and a fickle American public making the choice. In the age of Moneyball, it’s getting even tougher. Barack Obama and his nerd legions proved there are votes to be found in the embrace of Big Data. The next presidential race—and all this year’s midterms—promise to throw even more wonkery into the practice of our (other) national sport. Herewith, a guide to what the best innovators in politics think is coming next.

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In the old days, media teams had one main job: to make TV ads and buy time on the networks. But there’s no such thing as a “TV ad” anymore; video needs to find voters on their laptops and phones, too. As campaigns get smarter about identifying the voters they want to reach and find themselves able to design increasingly personalized messages for their target audiences, they face an unexpected problem: How do we produce all this stuff? Gone will be the single 30-second spot. It will be replaced with, say, a six-second Vine, a 15-second pre-roll ad precisely placed in front of the right YouTube clip, long-form video for voters looking for a deeper dive—and versions of each of these tailored to unique audiences (women under age 25, Hispanic males and so on). The campaign that can manage all that content—and do it well—will be the one that wins. —Zac Moffatt, digital director, Romney 2012; co-founder, digital strategy firm Targeted Victory

Real-time Analytics for Fickle Voters

How often do you change your mind? I’m guessing a lot. So do voters, and on a fast-changing campaign, analytics have to be continually updated to keep pace. Campaigns need to be able to send the right message at exactly the right time to the right person—and soon they will. —Jim Messina, campaign manager, Obama 2012; Organizing for Action chairman

Google Glass for Politics

We are at the very beginning of the sensor revolution, with wired, wearable computers as the first act. It’s conceivable that, in the future, yard signs and billboards will be able to measure how many cars pass by. T-shirts and other campaign gear worn by field workers could automatically tally how many doors are knocked on and transmit this data back to a campaign’s central hub. —Sara Fagen, White House political director, President George W. Bush; partner, public affairs firm DDC

The Death of Polling

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In 2010, a group of scientists did a study to see whether Facebook could affect voter turnout. With Facebook’s help, they arranged for virtually every American using the site to see one of several different sets of “get out the vote” messages; the researchers then used voter rolls to analyze which types of messages most affected voter turnout. Because almost every single American on Facebook was included in the study—nearly 61 million people—there was no need for sampling. In fact, Chris Anderson had anticipated the end of sampling when he was editor of Wired magazine in 2008, writing, “Faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete. … Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” Polling—a kind of science built on sampling and models—is about to become obsolete. —Nicco Mele, lecturer, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; co-founder, consulting firm EchoDitto

Ads That Skate to the Puck

Wayne Gretzky, asked to explain his hockey genius, once shared a prescription: “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Online advertising needs to be a lot more like Wayne. Right now, campaigns buy ads targeting people who have liked a similar candidate on Facebook or who have visited sites related to the candidate. Those poor souls are bombarded, while others are ignored. Campaigns need to be able to target ads to the people who have yet to take action, but just might if we talk to them in the right way. —Ken Strasma, targeting director, Obama 2008; founder and president, consulting firm Strategic Telemetry

The New War Room

From 1980 through 2004, most professional campaign staff focused on “graduating” from a campaign job to starting or joining a top polling, media or direct-contact shop. Future top strategists will not be the ad makers but, rather, the data interpreters. That means Big Data will drive not only TV ad placement, but also the creative process, as predictive modeling will better provide details about what really moves voters. —Sara Fagen